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1 Would protectionism defuse global imbalances and spur economic activity? A scenario analysis amid Faruqee International Monetary Fund Douglas Laxton International Monetary Fund Dirk Muir Bank of Canada Paolo Pesenti Federal Reserve Bank of New York, NBER and CEPR This draft: October 6 We thank Matt Canzoneri, Mick Devereux, Dale enderson, Christina Knowles, Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, Stephen Tokarick and Dietrich Vollrath, as well as two anonymous referees, for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Susanna Mursula and Chris Tonetti for invaluable assistance. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the International Monetary Fund, its Executive Board or its management, the Bank of Canada, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve System, or any other institution with which the authors are a liated.

2 Abstract In the evolving debate and analysis of global imbalances, a commonly overlooked issue pertains to rising protectionism. This paper attempts to ll that gap, examining the macroeconomic implications of trade policy changes through the lens of a dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy encompassing four regional blocs. Simulation exercises are carried out to consider the imposition of uniform and discriminatory tari s on trading partners as well as the case of tari retaliation. We also discuss a scenario in which a globalization backlash lowers the degree of competition in import-competing sectors, and compare the implications of higher markups in the product and labor markets. JEL classi cation: E66, F3, F47 Keywords: current account de cit, multi-country DGE models, net asset positions, trade policy.

3 Should globalization be allowed to proceed and thereby create an ever more exible international nancial system, history suggests that current imbalances will be defused with little disruption... I say this with one major caveat. Some clouds of emerging protectionism have become increasingly visible on today s horizon...the costs of any new such protectionist initiatives, in the context of wide current account imbalances, could signi cantly erode the exibility of the global economy. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Introduction Unprecedented global imbalances have stirred an ongoing and lively policy debate. Can they be sustained, and for how long? If not, can an orderly rebalancing be achieved without severely disrupting international trade and nance or global growth? Past episodes tell a cautionary tale regarding the implications of very large de cits (and their reversals). Guided by lessons of history, mainstream views worry about the inevitable external adjustment and the prospect of large swings in the value of the dollar. 3 Others believe that concerns are overblown and question the instructiveness of past experiences, noting that an expanding universe of current accounts, declining correlations between saving and investment, and accumulating gross (as well as net) foreign asset positions 4 signify a rapidly shifting global landscape. 5 But attention and concern attached to external balances have, in fact, increased not decreased in recent years. In particular, persistent and widening trade and payments imbalances have fuelled rising protection sentiment and posturing in a number of countries. In the United States, for example, several congressional bills concerning trade imbalances have been written. 6 At the heart of the controversy are sizable trade surpluses in emerging Asia, paired with substantial foreign reserve accumulation and large-scale intervention in the currency market to limit exchange rate exibility. In fact, roughly three-quarters of the vast global reserve build-up between 999 and 4 is attributable to Asia. During that time, key Asian central banks including India, South Korea, Taiwan, ong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia as a group have more than doubled their o cial holdings of foreign securities, mostly U.S. Treasuries, to over $ / trillion. Japan and China account for the bulk of these holdings, although oil exporting countries have more recently played a larger role in foreign reserve accumulation. 7 Central to their new Bretton Woods hypothesis, Dooley, Folkerts-Landau and Gar- Greenspan (3). See Milesi-Ferretti and Razin (), Edwards (4) and Freund (5). 3 See, for example, Obstfeld and Rogo (, 6), International Monetary Fund (). 4 See Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (, 3, 4), Tille (3), Faruqee and Lee (6). See also International Monetary Fund (5a). 5 ausmann and Sturzenegger (6) argue that the U.S. is e ectively neither a de cit nor a debtor country once the value of foreign assets is appropriately assessed (i.e., taking the so-called dark matter into account). Buiter (6) criticizes this logic. Gourinchas and Rey (6) suggest that the current account itself is becoming a less relevant concept, given ever-increasing valuation e ects, which can facilitate external adjustment. 6 For a survey of U.S. congressional trade bills related to China see ufbauer and Wong (4). 7 See Garton (4), iggins and Klitgaard (4).

4 ber (4, 6) emphasize how these policy actions are deliberately related to export-led growth and development strategies strategies that could remain in place for a very long time. 8 Undervaluation of Asian currencies which Goldstein (4) estimates to be 5 to 5 percent in the case of China obviously does not help to unravel rising trade frictions. And beyond exchange rate policies, another contentious issue is implicit export subsidies, including inter-alia tax advantages and other government preferences, state-owned enterprises, and export zones, 9 whose trade implications are often not dissimilar to those of an undervalued currency. But scapegoating often emanates from domestic economic woes, and the recent situation may not be an exception. In the recent past job growth in the United States has been below previous economic recoveries, particularly in sectors exposed to foreign competition. Wages have also reacted slowly to changing business conditions. Not surprisingly, politicians and business leaders alike are tempted to support protectionism as an appealing and politically costless recipe to address internal and external problems. What seems to be missing or severely overlooked in this debate is the quantitative assessment of the implications for the world economy of a potential resurgence in protectionism. Questions such as the one in the title of this paper cannot be satisfactorily addressed without a coherent analytical framework to guide scenario analysis and simulation exercises. This paper is a preliminary step in this direction. First, we set up and calibrate a general-equilibrium, dynamic model of the world economy encompassing four regional blocs, one of which is emerging Asia. The model represents we believe a fair compromise between the two extreme poles of realism and complexity versus stylization and tractability. While its scale is larger and its structure more detailed than most academic dynamic general-equilibrium models, our model shares with the relevant literature the adoption of solid choice-theoretic foundations, and closely builds on recent theoretical developments in international macroeconomics. The model converges to a well-de ned non-stochastic steady-state, where all relevant macroeconomic variables are determined as functions of structural parameters and policy variables. We carry out comparative statics exercises by comparing the steady-state properties of the model before and after the imposition of import tari s. We consider the e ects of protectionist policies undertaken by each importing country both when tari s are imposed on imports from the rest of the world as a whole and when they discriminate across exporters. Next, we construct a baseline scenario as follows. We take a speci c point in time (namely, 6Q) at which the economy is assumed not to be in a steady state due to the occurrence of several country-speci c macroeconomic shocks sometime in the past. The shocks have di erent sizes and di erent degrees of persistence. Judgemental assumptions about these shocks are made to guarantee that, at the beginning of the simulation horizon, the model generates values for the relevant endogenous variables which are broadly consistent with the observed levels at the end of 5. The propagation mechanism intrinsic to the 8 See Eichengreen (4), Roubini and Setser (5) for a critique. 9 See, for example, ufbauer and Wong (4) and Morrison (5). Morgan Stanley, for example, estimates that removing China s explicit and implicit export subsidies would be equivalent to a 6 percent appreciation of the currency against the dollar (quoted in Laura D Andrea Tyson, Stop Scapegoating China Before It s Too Late, Business Week, May, 5). The model is a variant of the Global Economy Model (GEM) developed at the International Monetary Fund.

5 model generates dynamic paths for all endogenous variables converging to the new steadystate world equilibrium levels. We refer to these paths as the baseline scenario in our analysis. While it is not meant to provide a macroeconomic forecast for the world economy, our baseline provides plausible quantitative elements to asses the extent of price and quantity adjustment associated with global rebalancing. Finally, we reconsider the above scenario modi ed to account for the unanticipated imposition of import tari s at the beginning of the simulation horizon, and study how the new scenario deviates from the previous baseline. According to our estimates, a generalized percent hike against emerging Asia improves the US current account balance as a share of GDP by a mere. percentage point. The e ect disappears after about two years, and in the absence of further adjustment in net saving, it may even revert sign. Similar e ects hold in the rest of the world. All in all, our analysis strongly suggests that the answer to the question in the title of this paper is a resounding no. The paper is structured as follows. Section brie y provides a non-technical overview of the model and discusses the calibration. The baseline scenario is introduced in Section 3. Section 4 considers the e ects of tari hikes, both uniform and selective, and discusses the case in which protectionist pressures take the form of a backlash against competition-friendly reforms in import-competing sectors. Section 5 concludes. A model of the global economy. The theoretical structure The simulation model we adopt in this paper builds upon Faruqee, Laxton, Muir and Pesenti (hereinafter FLMP) (6), appropriately modi ed. In this section we limit ourselves to a very synthetic overview of the theoretical framework, highlighting a few formal features of particular relevance for the simulation exercises. The world economy consists of four regional blocs ( countries ): US (United States), 3 JE (Japan and euro area), AS (Emerging Asia), and RC (Remaining Countries). In each country, there are households, rms, and a government. The overall structure of the model is illustrated in Figure, and each sector is described in turn below. Each household consumes a non-tradable nal good (C in Figure ), and is the monopolistic supplier of a di erentiated labor input (`) to all domestic rms. Some households are liquidity-constrained and do not have access to capital markets. They nance their consumption exclusively through disposable labor incomes. The remaining households own domestic rms and the domestic capital stock (K), which they rent to domestic rms. They also own two short-term nominal bonds, one denominated in domestic currency and issued by the country s government, and another denominated in US currency and issued in zero net supply worldwide. There are intermediation costs for national households transacting in the international bond market. 4 Labor and capital are immobile internationally. The Technical details are extensively discussed in the Appendix to the working paper version of this article. 3 To avoid confusion, in the text we refer to US as the region of the model, and to the U.S. as the real-world United States. 4 Like most open-economy general-equilibrium models, the assumption that all current-account transactions are settled in terms of a unique international bond is made for parsimony reasons. We leave to future developments the extension of the model toward a more realistic nancial market structure which includes trade in equities as well. 3

6 market for capital is competitive, and capital accumulation is subject to adjustment costs. In the labor market wage contracts are subject to nominal rigidities. On the production side, perfectly competitive rms produce two nal goods a consumption good (A) and an investment good (E). The consumption good is consumed either by domestic households or by the government (G C ). Similarly, demand for the investment good is split between private agents (I) and the public sector (G I ). Final goods are produced by using all available intermediate goods as inputs. Intermediate goods are either non-traded (N) or traded internationally (T ). Domestic tradables used by domestic rms are denoted Q, imports from all other country blocs are denoted M. To model realistic dynamics of trade volumes, we assume that imports are subject to short-term adjustment costs that temporarily lower the response of import demand to changes in relative prices. Intermediate goods are available in di erent varieties, each produced by a single rm under conditions of monopolistic competition worldwide. The prices of intermediate goods are subject to adjustment costs (nominal price rigidities). These goods are produced with domestic labor inputs and domestic capital. Finally, the government purchases the two national nal goods, as well as nontradable services G N. As treasury, the government nances the excess of its expenditures over net taxes by borrowing from the domestic private sector, although its net tax rate is set in such a way as to achieve a stable long-run target debt-to-gdp ratio. As central bank, the government manages the national short-term nominal interest rate. Monetary policy is speci ed in terms of a credible commitment to an interest rate rule that either targets in ation or the exchange rate.. Parameterization of the regional blocs We refer the reader to FLMP (6) for a detailed account of the calibration of the model. In general, we rely on previous work done with the IMF s Global Economy Model (GEM), as well as estimates from the literature and our own empirical work. Given the importance of a multi-country setting, some thought has been given to the composition of the regional blocs: US (the United States), JE (Japan and the euro area countries), AS (Emerging Asia: China, India, ong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan province of China and Thailand) and RC (the Remaining Countries not considered elsewhere). The steady-state shares of world GDP of the four blocs are, respectively, 7.9, 3., 5.5 and 4.4 percent. The decision to combine Japan and the euro area into one region re ects, from the vantage point of our project, their overlap in key structural characteristics low productivity growth, very low in ation (or de ation), and structural rigidities, particularly in the labor market. Needless to say, Japan and the euro area have exhibited very di erent behaviors in the past regarding the accumulation of U.S. assets and foreign exchange intervention policy. owever, our prior is that their role in the global rebalancing process will become comparatively less relevant in the years ahead, especially when compared to Emerging Asia. This latter bloc groups Asian countries with strong growth and whose currencies have recently exhibited limited exibility against the U.S. dollar. Moreover, their labor markets tend to be rapidly growing and fairly exible. In addition, the ongoing process of market liberalization is expected to reduce entry barriers and enhance competition, including in the major constituents such as India and China. The Remaining Countries bloc is dominated by the other members of the European Union (particularly the United Kingdom) and the other major OECD countries such as 4

7 Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico. We assume that in US, JE and RC the share of liquidity-constrained consumers is 5 percent. The share is much higher in Emerging Asia at 5 percent, re ecting the nascent or underdeveloped nancial markets for domestic consumers particularly, in the cases of China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. The rates of time preference underlying steady-state real interest rates are initially set at.7 percent but can di er across countries over the simulation exercise: in the new steady state US, the most impatient region, has the highest rate of time preference at 3. percent; AS, the most patient, has a rate of.6 percent. The elasticity of substitution between labor and capital is set at.75 in both the tradable and nontradable sectors. The share of capital in the production functions is calibrated to achieve a relatively high investment share of GDP in AS, and a low share in US, in line with their respective historical averages. In all regions, the nontradable sector (e.g., services) is assumed to be less capital intensive than the tradable sector (e.g., manufacturing). The depreciation rate is assumed to be two percent per quarter across all regions. There are separate markups on tradable and non-tradable goods since rms have some pricing power under monopolistic competition. We use estimates for the price markups from Martins, Scarpetta and Pilat (996) in the case of US, JE and RC. The US bloc has the lowest price markups, indicating the greatest degree of competition, while Japan and the euro area have the highest. For AS the markups are indicative of some (very) preliminary estimates done in the Research Department of the IMF for certain member countries of the AS bloc. Similarly, in the labor market agents have some pricing power. For US and JE the wage markups (6 percent and 3 percent respectively) correspond to Bayoumi, Laxton and Pesenti (4). 5 We further assume that RC is somewhere in between US and JE, with a percent wage markup, while we assume AS has a labor market as competitive as US. Monetary policy is parameterized as follows. US, JE and RC are all committed to price stability, and we assume they follow an in ation-forecast-based rule. 6 A representative calibration is used, with a weight of.75 on the lagged short-term interest in order to impart a high degree of smoothing in the setting of policy rates, and a weight of. on the three-quarter ahead gap between in ation and its target. The year-on-year CPI in ation target is assumed to be xed at two percent for JE and RC, and somewhat higher at.5 percent for US. Emerging Asia is assumed to pursue a xed exchange rate regime against the US currency. 7 The main results of the model rely heavily upon the calibration of each region s external sector. For given steady-state net foreign asset positions for each region, it is straightforward to calculate the current account and trade balances consistent with long-term stock- 5 Their determination of the wage markups is based, in turn, on Jean and Nicoletti (), who consider the wage di erentials for a variety of industries in the United States and six member states of the Euro Area. 6 In ation-forecast-based rules have been used extensively in central-bank models with in ation-targeting regimes in both advanced and emerging-market economies. See however the discussion in Svensson and Woodford (5). 7 This should be interpreted as a sensible approximation rather than in literal terms, given that China is the largest member of AS, and the limited exibility of its currency against the U.S. dollar is at the center of the current policy debate. Similarly, other members such as ong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia attempt to manage the volatility of their currencies vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar. 5

8 ow equilibrium. Using the IMF s Direction of Trade Statistics on merchandise trade, the national accounts data on the imports of goods and services, and the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics (COMTRADE) data on each region s imports of consumer and capital goods, we derive a disaggregated steady-state matrix delineating the pattern and composition of trade for all regions exports and imports. A more aggregated form is found in Figure. On the basis of this trade matrix, we derive all the weight coe cients in the demand function for imports and the regional composition of imports. For the corresponding trade elasticities, we assume that the elasticity of substitution between domestically-produced and imported tradable consumption goods and investment goods is.5 as in Bayoumi, Laxton and Pesenti (4). The elasticity of substitution between goods from di erent regions for imported consumption goods and imported investment goods is set at.5, consistent with existing estimates of import elasticities. Lastly, we need to calibrate the behavior of net foreign liabilities (NFL). For the long-run behavior of net foreign assets our prior is that a permanent increase in government debt by one percentage point of GDP is roughly associated with an increase in the net foreign liability position of the region by.5 percentage points of GDP. Moreover, when the United States expands its net foreign liabilities as a result of a permanent change in its public debt, the absorption of new issuance by each region is calibrated (on the basis of net foreign asset holdings in recent years) by assigning 4 percent of new issuance by US to AS, and 38 percent to each of JE and RC. This calibration implies that for a one percent NFL-to- GDP shock in US, the AS net-foreign-asset-to-gdp rises the most around.8 percent of GDP while JE and RC see their ratios only rise by around.3 and.5 percent of GDP respectively. 3 The baseline scenario The rst step in our analysis is the construction of a baseline scenario of current account rebalancing for the world economy. The baseline scenario is an attempt to identify the sources of the current global disequilibrium, accounting for both the shocks emanating from the United States and the other regions. The purpose of the baseline is to coherently guide our thinking about the central questions surrounding external developments: What are the key macroeconomic factors underlying the recent dynamics of current account imbalances and real exchange rates in the world economy? What assumptions about the size and persistence of the key underlying shocks are needed to t the facts? What is the range of possible future trajectories for the relevant macroeconomic variables? Our baseline is constructed in a similar way as the baseline presented in FLMP (6) and International Monetary Fund (5b, Appendix.), although it is revised and updated to account for 5 data. As in our previous work, our working hypotheses are that the central tendencies underlying the global macroeconomic imbalances in the early s can be attributed to a combination of six related but distinct shocks. The rst three shocks center around the United States economy:. igher US government debt (with initial tax cuts followed by future tax hikes) centered around the announced plans of the United States federal government. 8 8 In our simulation the steady-state government-debt-to-gdp ratio in the US increases by.5 percentage points. In the short run the de cit-to-gdp ratio for the US peaks at 5 percent after two years, and then declines to the steady-state value of.7 percent of GDP. 6

9 . A permanent decline in the private savings rate in the United States relative to the rest of the world An increase in the demand for US assets abroad, particularly in the AS bloc. The next two shocks re ect relative productivity trends in the rest of the world. In the model, worldwide convergence of productivity growth rates is taken as the anchoring feature of the economy in the long term. owever, prolonged deviations from balanced growth can play a key role in the unfolding of medium-term rebalancing scenarios, in line with the asymmetric tendencies observed across regions in the past decade. The shocks are: 4. Very persistent and rapid productivity growth in AS with a central tendency starting at 5.5 percent per year. 5. Very persistent and lagging productivity growth in JE with a central tendency of.75 percent per year. The nal shock attempts to capture structural changes in the pattern of world trade, including strategies of export promotion in Emerging Asia 3 leading to upward shifts in the range and quality of AS exported varieties, as well as preference shifts toward AS goods in world demand. The speci c way these competitiveness-friendly strategies are introduced is through: 6. A short-run and temporary positive shock to AS scal policy to promote exports with a magnitude of 33 percent, associated with an increase in the rest of the world demand for AS exports by 5 percentage points. 4 9 The private savings shock has both a temporary and permanent component. The permanent component is represented by an increase in the rate of time preference in the US relative to the rest of the world of 5 basis points. For the temporary component, we reduce the risk premium on US assets for all regional blocs by one percent for 5 years. The shock is implemented as a change in desired net foreign asset positions. In order to nance the increase in US net foreign liabilities by percentage points of GDP, AS increases its steady-state holdings of net foreign assets by.5 percentage points of GDP; JE increases its steady-state holdings of net foreign assets by 5. percentage points of GDP; and RC increases its steady-state holdings of net foreign assets by nine percentage points of GDP. Technically, the productivity growth rate in AS di ers between the tradable and nontradable sectors. For the nontradables sector, productivity grows at three percent per year for eight years. The shock in the tradable sector is much larger, and much longer. On average, the productivity growth rate in Emerging Asia is close to 5.5 percent a year at the beginning of the simulation, declining steadily to around.5 percent after 3 years and returning to the trend two percent growth rate two years later. To be more precise, we assume that productivity grows at.5 percent per year for 3 years in Japan and the euro area for both the tradable and nontradable sectors, instead of at the world trend growth rate of two percent. 3 This includes tax rebates, accelerated depreciation allowances, and tax holidays. 4 This shock is implemented as a positive increase in the AS scal de cit above 4 percent of GDP in the rst year, which declines to. percent of GDP by the end of the ninth year. Afterwards it reverts to the de cit consistent with the original long-run debt target of 4 percent of GDP. At the same time, world preferences for Asian imports shift up by 5 percentage points of their total imports over roughly three years. For example, the bias of US consumers for imported goods from Emerging Asia increases from. to.6, with a corresponding decrease in demand for imported goods from RC from.58 to.53. This implies that in the long run, for every additional one hundred units of imports in JE, RW or US, ve of those units now come from AS rather than from the other trading partners. 7

10 The six aforementioned shocks form the components for our integrated baseline scenario. As mentioned earlier, the shocks should be viewed as the central tendencies of the scenario, while the latter is presented more broadly as a range of potential outcomes. In presenting the baseline scenario, we consider a range of possibilities that accounts for the degree of uncertainty around the central tendency of the six component shocks. A high degree of uncertainty, in particular, surrounds the outcome of shocks related to private savings in the United States, rest of world preferences for holdings of US assets, and the positive productivity shock in Emerging Asia. For the outcome of shocks related to the U.S. scal policy and lagging productivity in Japan and the euro area, the uncertainty bounds are more narrow. The baseline scenario begins in 6Q. As mentioned in the introduction, at the beginning of the simulation horizon the model is not in a steady state. Rather, the aforementioned shocks are assumed to have materialized during the quarters preceding 6Q, and at the beginning of the simulation horizon the world economy is already on a transition path toward the new steady state. We believe that using this time frame for the combination of the six shocks (with minor modi cations to smooth demand and monetary policy) is the best strategy to represent our baseline view of the world economy at the beginning of 6. Figure 3 presents the baseline scenario in the United States. The pre-6 time series are historical data. After 6Q we plot our model-based projections, with the solid lines referring to the central tendencies and the dotted lines quantifying risks to the basic scenario. The key features are a gradual build up in US government debt and a decline in net foreign assets. The exchange rate depreciates gradually to allow the net asset position to stabilize. This generates the trade surplus required to nance the interest obligations resulting from the increase in net foreign liabilities. Consumption as a share of GDP is higher in the short run but is eventually crowded out as US becomes more heavily indebted. In addition, investment is crowded out by persistent budgetary de cits. Overall, the dynamics in the United States are driven by the current account de cit moderating from about 6 percent of GDP to a sustainable level in years time. To a signi cant extent the increased supply of US assets is absorbed by Emerging Asia (Figure 4). Initially AS runs a large and growing current account surplus. Eventually, the trade balance turns negative to support the large increase in the net foreign asset position. To absorb the in ows from the interest payments on its net foreign asset position, the AS real e ective exchange rate roughly strengthens between and percent over the next ve years, an appreciation achieved in real terms through higher in ation. Because of limited exchange rate exibility, there is an increase in the real interest rate necessary to defend the stability of the currency. Overall, the economy cools down in the short run, as higher interest rates dampen investment and real appreciation a ects net exports. owever, consumption increases as a share of GDP in the medium term in anticipation of higher wealth (and lower saving) in the long run. Japan and the euro area are relatively stable in terms of adjustment, experiencing few e ects as Emerging Asia absorbs most of the increased US demand for goods and the increased supply of US assets (Figure 5). The JE external account is broadly stable going forward, with only a temporary and small current account improvement until it stabilizes around.5 percent of GDP in about years time. The Remaining Countries bloc behaves much like Emerging Asia since it has strong links with the United States (mainly Canada and Mexico). But RC absorbs less US debt as there is no large underlying positive shock to its preference for US assets. Furthermore, it experiences relatively little in ation and exhibits a smaller movement in its real e ective 8

11 exchange rate than Emerging Asia because in the simulations it conducts its monetary policy by targeting in ation rather than the nominal exchange rate. 4 Scenarios involving protectionist policies In this section we run a set of simulation exercises on the macroeconomic e ects of trade policies in the global economy. Using a dynamic general-equilibrium model as the analytical framework of our simulation exercises allows us to consider both the long-term implications of higher tari s and their dynamic e ects in the short and medium term, as well as what implications they might have for monetary and scal policies. Since in this venue we are not concerned with a detailed sectoral account of trade distortions, our methodology lumps together the myriad of potential protectionist barriers and considers an hypothetical average tari on imports as the only trade policy instrument. 5 We allow however for discrimination across exporters, in order to track down the e ects of selective intervention against speci c countries, in particular the Emerging Asia (AS) bloc. We rst use our four-region steady-state model to estimate the long-run e ects of tari s, obtaining results which are consistent with the optimal tari argument. Second, to assess whether or not tari s would be an e ective policy initiative for alleviating current account imbalances, we examine both the comparative static and dynamic e ects of higher tari s imposed on imports from emerging Asia. Finally, because the process of globalization may have been an important factor in increasing competition throughout the world, we complete our analysis by studying the implications of protectionist pressures toward a partial reversal of these trends (a globalization backlash leading to higher markups in the tradables sector), and compare these results with similar scenarios of higher markups in the labor and product markets. 4. A world protectionist surge: Long-term e ects of a hike in tari rates against all other countries A considerable amount of research on the impact of tari and non-tari barriers has been carried out in the trade and industrial organization literature, using computational generalequilibrium models to estimate the e ects predicted by the theory. In this section we build on this body of work while focusing on a macroeconomic perspective. 6 The obvious starting point in our analysis is to use our model to estimate what would be the long-term response of key macroeconomic variables to a permanent change in the degree of protectionism worldwide. These e ects depend on the interaction between the distortions associated with the imposition of the tari itself and other distortions in the macroeconomy, either related to structural factors (e.g. whether the country is large enough to have monopoly power on its terms of trade) or policy choices (e.g. whether the increased tari revenue compensates for a reduction in distortionary taxation on capital and labor incomes for an unchanged level of government spending, or rather nances additional public absorption G C and G I ). 5 A summary of several studies on the (static) general equilibrium impact of trade liberalization, in the context of examining the e ects of the Uruguay Round, can be found in Whalley (). The cited studies are based on multi-sector, multi-region models that uniformly assume Armington-type (CES) trade structures to examine the long-run trade policy e ects in more detail as well as their global impact. 6 Among the classic contributions in this literature see Torrens (833), Mill (844), Edgeworth (894), and Bickerdike (97). More recent contributions include Graaf (95), Johnson (96), amilton and Whalley (983), Gross (987), Markusen and Wigle (989), Grossman and elpman (995) and Frensch (). 9

12 The important insight from the optimal tari literature posits that for a single large country it may be optimal to raise tari s, but when all countries do so they may all lose. The basic intuition for this result dates back at least to Torrens (833) and Mill (844), whose analysis suggested that a tari reduces welfare by distorting consumption and production decisions but can lead to a terms of trade improvement if foreigners reduce their prices facing lower demand for their exports. This terms-of-trade gain amounts to a transfer of wealth towards the country imposing the tari, which tends to appreciate its currency. Whether a country gains or loses as a whole thus depends on the strength of the terms-of-trade e ect, which in turn depends on the elasticity of substitution between imported goods and domestically produced tradables. Table reports estimates of the long-run domestic and spillover e ects of a percentage point hike in tari s in each of the regions. The tari hikes are assumed to apply to all imports, regardless of country of origin. For example, the rst column in Table refers to the e ects of a percent hike in US tari s against imports from AS, JE and RC, the second column refers to a tari in AS against imports from US, JE and RC, etc. The last column refers to a scenario in which each country simultaneously raises its import barriers against all other countries (illustrating the e ects of a trade war ). The results in Table assume that the additional revenue from the tari hikes is used to reduce the tax rate on labor income. The general pattern that emerges from these simulations is that the tari hike has a contractionary spillover on the rest of the world (where welfare falls for all consumers) but an expansionary impact in the protectionist country (who has an increase in welfare), at least as long as no other country follows suit and retaliates. Consider for instance a scenario in which the United States raises its tari s against foreign imports ( rst column). In the United States itself, real GDP rises permanently by. percent, consumption by.4 percent and labor e ort by a half percentage point, while the real exchange rate appreciates by 6.3 percent. On impact, the tari alters the relative price of imported versus domestically-produced goods. Because of the relatively high elasticity of substitution between domestically-produced and imported goods, there is a strong shift into domestic production, leading to an increase in labor demand. igher consumption re ects these labor income gains as well as the wealth e ect from the change in the terms of trade, discussed above. Conversely, in the rest of the world there is a generalized output fall (. percent in Emerging Asia,.4 percent in the JE bloc, and. in the rest of the world) with real exchange rate depreciations. Similar considerations hold for the next three columns, showing the e ects of protectionist hikes in AS, JE and RC respectively. The largest expansionary e ect on the domestic economy is found in the AS case, the smallest in the US case. This is not surprising, as the direct e ects of tari s are highly related to the degree of openness of the respective economies, and we should expect them to be larger in regions that have greater exposure to trade. In fact, as shown in the very last row of Table, imports represent about 6 percent of GDP in Emerging Asia, 4 percent in the Remaining Countries bloc, 6 percent in Japan and the euro area, and only percent in the United States. Obviously, tari revenue as a share of GDP is higher in the countries that have greater openness. The size of the protectionist spillovers to the rest of the world di er from case to case. For instance, a tari hike in the United States has a large contractionary impact in Emerging Asia (. percent GDP reduction), but a tari hike in Emerging Asia has relatively small repercussions on the US economy (.3 percent GDP reduction). The worst GDP spillovers are found in the JE bloc when the Remaining Countries hike their tari s (output falls by

13 .4 percent) and in the Emerging Asia bloc as a result of protectionism in Japan and the euro area. In sum, our results are suggestive that terms of trade e ects may be quantitatively relevant and each country may be tempted to raise tari s. 7 Note, however, that when all countries hike tari s by equal amounts, these terms-of-trade e ects work to o set each other, so that the only macroeconomic e ects left are the distortions in consumption and production decisions. In other words, nobody wins when protectionism surges worldwide. As the last column of Table reports, if all countries hike their tari rates simultaneously, we see a fall in welfare of. percent for the majority of consumers (i.e. the forward-looking consumers). 8 Interestingly, the liquidity-constrained consumers actually see an increase in their welfare of.4 percent, but this result stems partially from the fact that, by construction, the increase in tari s has the positive e ect of reducing distortionary taxation in the labor market, thus boosting labor e ort and employment in steady state (and the consumption of liquidity-constrained agents, whose wealth depends solely on labor income). Moreover, output contracts everywhere. Emerging Asia, Japan and the euro area are the main victims (-. percent), while the United States remains almost unscathed (-. percent). 9 Again, the muted output e ects are attributable to the reduction in the level of labor taxation resulting from the new revenue stream from the imposition of tari s. To control for these labor-supply e ects, in Table we consider the case in which higher tari revenue increases government absorption that does not contribute directly to either productive capacity or the welfare of consumers. Once again, in all cases the country that imposes the tari bene ts from a real exchange rate appreciation and higher output whenever it is the only country that raises the tari. And in all cases this increase in output comes at the expense of a contraction in those countries that face the higher tari rates and a real depreciation in their exchange rate. Welfare also falls for both types of consumers. But in Table there are signi cant negative crowding-out e ects on private consumption, investment and output relative to Table. Labor e ort falls everywhere in the world economy, no matter which country adopts a protectionist posture. Not surprisingly, the implications of a trade war (last column) worsen signi cantly. Welfare falls worldwide by.4 percent for forward-looking consumers and.7 percent for liquidity-constrained consumers. In the AS bloc, consumption falls by 6. percent in Table (as opposed to only.4 percent in Table ). In Japan and the euro area consumption falls by 4.5 percent (as opposed to.8 percent). Even in the United States, consumption now falls by.4 percent (it was virtually unchanged in Table ). In both Tables and there are very small e ects on the long-run current account balance as a share of GDP. This should be expected: even though our model allows for steady-state budgetary non-neutralities, in our simulation exercises tari s do not a ect in- 7 The size of the optimal tari may well di er across importers. In the theoretical trade literature it has been shown that the optimal tari rate is inversely related to the export supply elasticities see Bickerdike (97) and Grossman and elpman (995). Broda, Limao and Weinstein (6) provide some empirical support for this view by showing that countries with higher market power have higher average tari rates. 8 Welfare here is derived from the two utility functions, one for each type of consumer: forward-looking ones, who own all bonds and the capital stock, and liquidity-constrained ones. Welfare is measured in terms of consumption equivalents, de ned as the amount of consumption required to achieve a certain level of utility, holding labor supply (leisure) at the pre-tari steady-state level. 9 In Whalley (), the cited trade policy e ects or gains in that case (in terms of global output) range from. to.4 percent from the Uruguay Round liberalization whereby developed countries reduce average tari s by 36 percent over 6 years, and developing countries by 4 percent over years.

14 tertemporal decisions and therefore have no signi cant and permanent e ects on current account balances. owever, this result should be accompanied by the caveat that in alternative scenarios import tari s may play some role as long as the additional tax revenue is used to reduce the government-debt-to-gdp ratio and the level of national savings in the economy where the tari is imposed. 4. Selective trade policies: Long-term and dynamic e ects of a hike in tari rates against Emerging Asia The next set of experiments consider both the comparative static and dynamic e ects of imposing tari s exclusively on imports from emerging Asia. In all cases the increase in tari revenue is used to reduce the tax rate on labor income, as in Table. The rst three columns in Table 3 report the comparative-static e ects under the assumption that these policies are implemented by each country bloc separately. The last column reports the results when all regions impose higher tari s on imports from emerging Asia. The results of these simulations are similar to the previous ndings in Table above, but the orders of magnitudes are smaller as only imports from AS are now a ected by the protectionist surge. Output, consumption and employment expand in the country that imposes the tari. AS is worse o, more when the JE trading partners hike their tari s (AS consumption falls by.6 percent) than when US does so (AS consumption falls by. percent). Again the main channel through which such beggar-thy-neighbor policies are e ective is through a real appreciation in the country that imposes the tari and a depreciation in the country that is subjected to the higher tari. There are also some interesting third country e ects. In general, the real exchange also tends to depreciate in the two other countries that are not a ected by the tari hikes. For example, an increase in tari s in the United States on imported goods from emerging Asia results in a depreciation of the real e ective exchange rate not only in emerging Asia (.4 percent), but also in the Japan-euro area bloc (. percent) and the Remaining Countries bloc (. percent). These third country e ects can be signi cant in some cases, suggesting that other regions can lose or possibly even bene t depending on their openness and trade patterns when two regions engage in a trade war. Moving now to a more detailed assessment of the short-run implications of trade protection against emerging Asia, Figures 6 to 9 report the dynamic e ects of a generalized (US/JE/RC) percent tari hike against AS on GDP, consumption, investment, the trade balance and the current account balance (both as a percentage of GDP), the short-term interest rate, in ation and the real e ective exchange rate in each country bloc. Besides the change in trade policies, the scenario is exactly as described in Section 3 above, and the time series charts are plotted as percentage deviations from the aforementioned baseline. The long-run endpoints of these charts are consistent with the last column of Table 3. Emerging Asia experiences a large contraction in consumption, investment and GDP in both the short run and long run (Figure 6, second chart). The real e ective exchange rate depreciates over time and is 4.5 percent higher in the long run (Figure 9, second chart). This results in both a trade and current account de cit (relative to baseline) that is over one percent of GDP in the short run (Figure 7, second chart). This e ect is only temporary and disappears over time, as AS consumers do not adjust their saving behavior in response to changes in the relative prices a ected by higher tari s. As indicated earlier, if the tari hike was used to reduce government debt, the non-ricardian properties of the model would result in an increase in both national and world savings, thus a permanent increase in the

15 current account balance for the country that imposed the tari. owever, these e ects would be true for any tax or expenditure instrument and are not directly attributable to the change in one instrument or another; rather, they would be simply a consequence of the permanent change in the target level of government debt. The responses in the other regions go in the opposite direction. These countries bene t from consumption and GDP increases both in the short and long run (Figure 6), and their real exchange rates appreciate (Figure 9). Trade policy is the main factor underlying price dynamics, as the countries that impose the tari witness a positive in ationary impulse in the short run and short-term interest rates rise to bring in ation closer to desired levels (Figure 8). In emerging Asia, instead, in ation falls by over 3 percentage points below baseline in the short run. Underlying this result is the assumption that emerging Asia maintains a regime of limited exchange rate exibility against the US currency, and consequently the depreciation in its real e ective exchange rate can only be brought about by lower in ation and not the weakening of its nominal exchange rate. In the protectionist countries there is a temporary improvement in both the trade and current account balances (Figure 7). Given their relevance for the ongoing rebalancing debate, these results are worth emphasizing in some detail. According to our projections, a generalized percent hike against emerging Asia improves the US current account balance as a share of GDP by a mere. percentage point. The e ect disappears after about two years, and in the absence of further adjustment in net saving, it may even revert sign. Similar e ects hold in JE and the RC blocs. Even if one was willing to consider a world tari hike three times as large as the one considered in our simulations (and a 3 percent hike certainly represents an upper bound under current circumstances), a surge in world protectionism would at best improve current accounts by half percentage points of GDP over a business-cycle horizon. This hardly sounds like the ultimate recipe to defuse global imbalances. In Figures to 3 we repeat the analysis above, except this time the tari hike is assumed to take place exclusively in the US bloc. The tari has a similar small and temporary positive e ect on the US trade and current account balances (Figure ), but what is more interesting is that it results in negative spillover e ects on economic activity in the two bystander regions (Japan, euro area and remaining countries) even though tari s are only raised on imported goods from emerging Asia. Indeed, for more open economies such as the RC bloc these e ects are signi cant on both consumption, investment and GDP (Figure, bottom chart). The previous analysis focused on tari hikes on imported goods from emerging Asia and showed that such policies are unlikely to be quantitatively successful in reducing current account imbalances on a sustainable basis. More importantly, because trade policies can only enhance welfare at the expense of the country against which the tari hike is being levied, such policies are likely to result in retaliation and protectionist escalades. To quantify this point, we consider the long-term e ects of tari s being imposed on imported goods from the United States see Table 4. As expected the real exchange rate depreciates in the United States and appreciates in the countries that are imposing the tari s. This results in a permanent reduction in US consumer welfare, consumption and GDP. Interestingly, there are also signi cant third-country e ects. For example, when the Remaining Countries bloc imposes a tari on imports from the United States, this has signi cant negative spillover e ects on emerging Asia. 3

16 4.3 A globalization backlash: Long-term e ects of a reversal of competition-friendly policies Among the purported bene ts of the process of globalization is the increase in competition and the resulting reduction of markups in both product and labor markets worldwide. An important risk going forward is that protectionist policies induced by trade imbalances could reverse this trend and result in higher market power in import-competing sectors. This is a di erent but related protectionist threat relative to the ones considered above, whose quantitative relevance needs to be assessed in the context of our analysis. This can be motivated by the recognition that often times protectionist measures do not take the explicit form of (say) ad valorem tari s but less transparent or even hidden non-tari barriers (NTBs). By erecting such trade barriers or frictions, these insular policies can e ectively reduce market access and, thus, the degree of competition in the marketplace. Although there is less agreement on how this should be precisely modeled, a reasonable formulation pursued here is via a reversal of competition-friendly policies. 3 Extending previous work in this area, in this section we take wage and price markups as proxies for the degree of competition in domestic labor and product markets, and consider the implications of changes in markups and their spillover e ects to other regions of the world. 3 In particular, we consider a scenario in which a globalization backlash leads to a moderate increase in markups by 5 percentage points in the tradables sector T (Table 5). We compare these results with similar scenarios leading to changes in markups in the nontradables sectors N (Table 6) as well as in the market for labor (Table 7). The key message is that in every case there are fairly large real income and consumption losses (mirrored in consumer welfare, particularly for the liquidity-constrained consumers), and in most cases signi cant negative spillover e ects to the rest of the world. Consider rst Table 5. A markup increase in the US tradables sector ( rst column) reduces welfare by.9 percent for forward-looking consumers, and 3.5 percent for liquidity-constrained consumers in the United States (and a reduction between. percent and.3 percent for both types of consumers in the rest of the world). Furthermore, there are reductions in US output by.3 percent and US consumption by percent, causing output losses between. and. percent in the other regions. The negative spillover e ects are even larger when the increase in markups occurs in the Japan and euro area bloc (third column) or the Remaining Countries bloc (fourth column). The reduction in purchasing power associated with higher markups can result in a fall in consumption by as much as.5 percent in regions such as emerging Asia. A generalized 5 percent increase in price markups worldwide (last column) reduces AS output by more than 3 percent, JE output by. percent and US output by.7 percent. igher markups in the nontradables and labor markets may have even larger domestic e ects, but not surprisingly the negative spillover e ects tend to be smaller than when the increases occur in the markets for tradable goods and services. For example, a 5 percent increase in markups in the tradables sector of the United States (Table 5, rst column) reduces its consumption by. percent, but also results in a reduction in consumption of 3 Unlike the case of tari s, treatment of NTBs has been hampered by a lack of common methodological approaches to evaluate them, both conceptually and empirically. See UNCTAD (5) for a list of possible NTBs and a review of the issues surrounding their scope, identi cation, classi cation, and impact. 3 Bayoumi, Laxton, and Pesenti (5) use a simpler but similar model to study the e ects of competitionfriendly reforms in the euro area. The most relevant di erence with respect to their approach is that our model encompasses a nontradables sector. 4

17 .3 percent in both emerging Asia and the Remaining Countries blocs. When the same increase materializes in the nontradables sector (Table 6, rst column), it results in a.5 percent reduction in consumption in the United States, a. percent fall in emerging Asia and no signi cant e ects in the other regions. When the increase occurs in the US labor market (Table 7, rst column), US consumption falls by.5 percent and by. percent everywhere else in the global economy. The long-term e ects on the current account balance are insigni cant, for precisely the same reason why they were not signi cant in the case of a hike in tari s, as such changes do not result in a shift in desired saving behavior. owever, changes in markups can have signi cant short-term e ects on the current account balance as consumption and investment take time to adjust to their new equilibrium levels. The long-term e ects on the real exchange rate can be quite signi cant, with responses similar to the ones associated with sector-speci c shocks to productivity. In all cases a positive shock to the markup results in a depreciation of the country s real exchange rate when the shock is in the tradables sector, and an appreciation when the shock is in the nontradables sector. This is consistent with the standard Balassa-Samuelson e ects in multisector open economy models. 5 Conclusion While the apparent ability of the global economy to nance large global imbalances may comfort some, rising protectionism in response to years of persistent and widening external imbalances is a clear and present danger. The temptation for countries to resort to beggar-thy-neighbor policies to remedy protracted current account de cits through trade and commercial policies including hiking import tari s or their equivalent trade barriers is understandable, but short-sighted. The scenario analysis in this paper shows that a country acting unilaterally may stand to gain through improving its terms of trade, at the expense of others, as the optimal tari literature would suggest. This is true with either uniform or discriminating tari increases. But the trade balance improvements are short-lived (given public and external indebtedness), and the prospect of trade retaliation underscores the potentially deleterious consequences for the overall global economy. According to our projections, a generalized percent hike against emerging Asia improves the US current account balance as a share of GDP by a mere. percentage point. The e ect disappears after about two years, and in the absence of further adjustment in net saving, it may even revert sign. Similar e ects hold in the rest of the world. Moreover, there are unintended third-country e ects on bystander countries, opening the likely possibility that any such actions would be matched by countervailing trade policy actions in partner countries, undermining the initial gains and leaving the world worse o than before. And the world contraction would be even more substantial if protectionist pressures took the form of a backlash against competition-friendly reforms in import-competing sectors. At the end of the day, a protectionist surge would lower global growth leaving global imbalances unresolved. 5

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